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Study Recommends Gnumeric Over MS Excel
Jody Goldberg writes "A recent study of analytic quality, and responsiveness to problems strongly preferred Gnumeric in place of MS Excel. With new problems popping up in Office XP the case for spreadsheet users to migrate is only getting stronger.
In some related Gnumeric quickies, a new stable version 1.2.6 was released, and Open has done an interview with the Maintainer."
In a recent interview, Jody said a W32 port was the priority. I think that could actually start pushing it over the top and make some real headway, I can see why it would be a priority.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Please give us the postscript version instead, if you can't use pdflatex and get a good result.
PS. I checked, there is no .ps at that URL.
The most recent release of Gnumeric is amazing. The only downside is that I often have trouble deciding between OOcalc or Gnumeric, and often flip back and forth depending on my mood. Both are worthy competitors for Excel.
I love that one of the "failings" of Gnumeric was that the random number generator function RND was *too* random - Gnumeric uses the /dev/urandom device that generates random numbers from noise sources in the system (noise diodes, interrupt events, user input, etc.) rather than using a psuedo-random number generator with a predictable sequence.
True, there are times it is nice to have a "random" number generator that you can re-run for testing, but having a really random number generator is better for a host of problems.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It seems as if they're moving way too prematurely on this. In the article it said they posted to a Microsoft newsgroup and didn't receive a reply, and that this means that Microsoft will never fix the bug. Obviously there -may- be some tech support people roaming the newsgroups, but it would've made much more sense to simply contact Microsoft's technical support department and talked with someone directly about this error.
This is similar to having your car found defective, and then placing a flyer downtown to ask the company to contact you about options instead of picking up the phone and dialing the correct number.
I'm not a fan of Microsoftian ideals, but wouldn't that have made more sense before going all this way?
I use excel at work all day and I have to say that no Open source solution comes close to providing what I expect a spreadsheet to do.
The idea that one should switch from excel to an open source solution because of a small set of statistics problems cannot be properly solved by excel seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. (unless you do nothing but statistical modelling all day)
Anyone understand this table? The text doesn't match the table, where gamma-S log relative error, unless I'm an idiot (which is entirely possible), is actually worse in v1.1.2 than v0.67?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Eric smiled, a bent grin freezing over his lips. His cheeks were flush and his heart fluttered. Not only had he just finished his nightly bottle of Jgermeister, but his Match.com flame from Kansas City had just emailed him back with her address.
Stuffing the printout of the email into the left breast pocket of his teal polo shirt, ESR shoved his chest out and stuck his shoulders back up as he spoke to himself, an aura of chirpy optimism about him.
"Alright. Let's get a move on!"
Several gym bags littered the floor around his kitchen table, all of various brands and colors. Each was filled to bursting point and was labeled in bold black marker. One said CLOTHES, a second had TOILETRIES scribbled on it, the third read LARP, and a fourth read GUNS. Eric had all the bases covered, he noted, save for his laptop.
Eric's laptop, several penguin and LNX stickers adorning it, was slowly but surely booting. Eric beamed at his pride and joy. Eric had visited Wal-Mart the night before and purchased a tape adapter. He had ripped Stallman Does Slovenia, a compilation of RMS's flute concerts performed in the Eastern Bloc, into Ogg Vorbis format and wanted to listen to it on the way to Kansas.
Finally bagging and slinging the laptop over his shoulder, Eric hunched over and grabbed two gym bags, shoved them in his car, and came back for the last two. He awkwardly dragged his foot several times before he dropped the bags on his doorstep, turned, and locked his door. Tugging one last time to make sure he had all five of his deadbolts secured, he piled into his 1985 maroon Dodge Omni and slammed the door shut.
A childish look of glee tightened Eric's face into a leering smile as he patted the steering wheel lovingly.
"Alright, ol' Bessie! We're going to Kansas City, Kansas City here we come! This is Manifest Destiny! This is fate! This is sex with a stranger from the Internet!"
At this Eric jammed his key into the ignition and turned it. The car jolted violently to life, gasping and coughing as the engine struggled to turn over. Dense blue smoke wafted from the tailpipe and hood while the sickly sweet smell of antifreeze filled the compartment. Coughing, Eric pumped the gas while he rolled down his salt-streaked window. With a few more knocks and pings the Omni jerked clumsily into gear and sputtered some gravel as it started down ESR's dirt driveway. Eric silently wondered if it would have been worth replacing the head gasket after it blew last time.
Whipping down his street toward the highway, Eric fiddled with the controls on his laptop as the sounds of RMS's gentle flute filled the car, drowning out the sound of his sputtering engine. In his toil ESR clumsily sideswiped a large yellow school bus full of children that had stopped in front of him, tearing the STOP sign from its side. As the bus driver shook a fist at him, ESR smiled and licked his lips, tasting the last few drops of the Jgermeister he had just finished.
Eric pushed the accelerator to the floor and his Omni climbed to 60 MPH as it sped West on Interstate 80. There was quite a drive to go, Eric thought, as the sun set ahead of him. He whistled quietly along to the music and locked his crooked eyes on the road. His only thought was of 4800 Kaw Drive.
A less than flattering release name.
Thought it might have meant "cancer of my flower necklace" or something.
What of the programmability? The killer feature of MS Office isn't the applications themselves, but VBA.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Someone had to pay for this little Gnumeric study! Get out the torches ... oh, wait.
The reason people won't switch away from MS Excel has nothing to do with technical specs and everything to do with the very large number of Macro's and templates already written. There is an awful huge installed base for whom Excel works fine, and they don't see the problem. Most of the financial services sector for example. From there point of view, it's not broke Why fix it?
If TODAY everything was equal, there would still be a 10 year lag until a change happened, as that is the roll out time, and the time to convince people they 'want' to change. It better have some kick butt feature that they don't have in Excel, or they are going to resist change. That is just the way people are
Gavin Fischer
I've e-mailed a well-informed and helpful Microsoft developer, whom I first encountered on this very forum, on several occasions. I'm told a number of bug reports have been filed against the application in question as a result of my e-mails, and some of the things I've mentioned to him have certainly been fixed in a later version of the product.
Some people at Microsoft do listen, you just have to make a bit of an effort to find them. Curiously, a comment from the developer in question was that the dev teams love direct contact with customers prepared to give them helpful information about bugs or feature requests, they just wish the PR people would stop getting in the way. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Keep in mind that inertia works both ways. Yes, there's a lot of folks that don't want to move. However, it's equally difficult (possibly worse) for Microsoft to regain any customers that do move. Also, actual movement tends to lag decision-making for a while, so visible market share lags actual inertia by some amount.
Finally, keep in mind that even upgrading from one version of Excel to another can break compatibility. The office world has very strong backwards-compatibility requirements. Gnumeric may not fill those requirements, but we also know that Excel doesn't do so.
May we never see th
The easiest way to get new versions of Gnome software is via garnome!
Garnome 0.30.1 was just released and it features the latest version of Gnome (2.5.5), The new, non ugly file dialog (but not all programs use it yet) and of course, Gnome Applications, including Gnumeric 1.2.6.
It is designed for IA-32 Gnu/Linux, but it should work on most OS's. Download it now.
And if you liked the power of garnome, you may be interested in the power of Gentoo Linux, which is like garnome for your entire distribution!
found here
/dev/urandom is not /dev/random. When the entropy pool is exhausted (which will happen extremely quickly if producing a large set of random numbers for statistical work), instead of blocking it will use a hash algorithm. /dev/urandom varies unpredictably between being unpredictable and being very unpredictable.
:-)
On the other hand, when doing a study, frequently you *do* want to be able to use the same seed to produce exactly the same results. This is a legitimate failing in gnumeric. Not all random numbers are created equal.
For what it's worth, I did (simple) analysis of a large set of random number generators for a high school science fair project. The Microsoft RNG (which has been used ever since at least early QBASIC days) is pretty decent, at least from a uniformity standpoint.
May we never see th
I've seen spreadsheets where MS-Excel would miscalculate results by 20%. MS-Excel also has enormous problems handling circular spreadsheets. Both are probably related to defects in the order-of-calculation algorithm.
Alright, who did Microsoft forget to pay?
Can we please not capitalize "the Maintainer"? It's a bit too "Logan's Run" for me, or for anyone I think. Geekness has overstepped boundaries when Those Who Are In Control of Software are afforded the same nobility in print as the King, the President, and the Messiah. Let's remember that software engineering is a discipline, a job, and that we, as a group, can't produce bugless office software, much less achieve such status in society that we must be addressed by our titles, that those titles must be honored, that the masses must gaze upon us and tremble ... which, by and large and not incidentally, they do---but only geeks would assume that it's in awe of our deep knowledge of C++ and Java ...
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I didn't read all of the linked article -- so whatever...however, I will say this: Anything that makes Microsoft Office look bad and (insert cheaper solution here) look better, I like.
For a $1000 computer, I pay ~$400 per license for MS Office Professional -- that's 40% of the cost of the computer. If I could convince management and our user base, I'd change to anything else because anything else would be cheaper (Star Office, Lotus Smart Suite, OpenOffice, whatever). I checked out Open Office with one of our accounting guys, and it worked just fine with all of his macros. Peace of mind against FUD just isn't worth that much. MS Office is a fine product, just not worth the price. If there was anything with a remotely competitive amount of market share, I'm sure that MS would drop their prices to stay competitive.
-Turkey
Insightful my arse. Spoken like someone who has never used Excel.
Do you know what Excel is for? It's for secretaries to knock up pie graphs for the boss to bore the rest of the staff to tears with, and keep track of the office 'dead poool' comp.
The whiners fall into a few categories.
'Wah, won't hold enough data' - Store the data somewhere else then. Go use SPSS or Access, Oracle etc. Excel will handle OPAL cubes.
'Wah, Excel is M$' - Fuck off and use Gnumeric then.
'Wah, Excel doesn't have some bloody obsure stats function' - Go get MathLab or similar then. What, short of dosh? Funny that.
'Wah, Excel doesn't have a real language' - It's got VBA, aka VB6. It's enough for most office jobs. You're not ray-tracing or writing an OS, your importing a text file or updating a Word template. Hell, I wrote a 3270 screenscraper in VBA. Fuck off and write your app in TASM/Smalltalk/Lisp/Perl/C/Java/Fortran/what fucking ever. I'll be finished and gone home. don't forget the lights.
Excel fills a niche, and does it reasonably well. Don't like it then don't use it. Yeah, bits of it suck. VLookups suck. Smart tags suck. Handling named ranges suck. Hey parent, you know what any of this means? No? Funny that.
Y'know, I'm starting to like Excel. Finish the sheet, lock it, strip the toolbars etc, send it. No install hassle, just copy it. Happy user, I get paid.
Rah open source, you know the rest.
Fixed in later versions means the customer had to buy a new version to get the bug fixes. That isn't support that is sales.
1. When you say "retail" you really mean "megacorp". I don't bring it up to be mean, but again, they're only about selling the things that make them the MOST money...not about providing a wide variety of options unless they profit from it. MS is a great bed-buddy for them because they speak "profit-speak" I've been noticing at by local BB how more shelf space is being give to a fewer number of vendors....with fewer products on display! /.rs! You could even make a system to pick your file list online...or even make "subscriptions" ala "slashdot favorites" to be picked up monthly! The only problem is that so much free stuff online is still "bottled" up where people don't want to share in such a situation...even though it's already free to download!
2. MS will do anything to "sell" office! Your comment about the "honor system" is great. Of course MS will use certian % of the sales as ammo for the "piracy" campaigns too. And that's the point really. They have the BSA to muscle businesses into using "pro" versions...while basicly "dumping" the basic version on the market to keep the 3. retail software is dead...and there's not a good way to bring OSS on to the shelves. The biggest problem in particular with OSS is out-of-date software!!! Most retail customers like my parents don't care for high-speed internet even if it was cheaper! that means they can only buy what's on the shelf...or the kids "bring over" for them. I could see a Fileplanet model [choosing, burning, and mailing downloads] maybe working...except that again, most people still don't use their CCs online! People want to pay $$$. You need a kiosk method of software distrobution. But you'd have to gaurantee $2000-3000 per month gross per location to make it break even!!! If you could go to a store like compUSA and hit a "sourceforge" kiosk that mirrored files off the web you might have something. You'd have to keep the overall price to $9.99 per session/CD or less to gain sales, but it could be useful even for
If you are using VBA in your spread sheet you need to move to a better solution - a dbms and a decent programming language.
Who said anyone needed a dbms?! I save my data in a spreadsheet. My macros, also in the spreadsheet file, operate on it. It's all very self-contained and it allow me to mail it to my clients and coworkers without worrying about dependencies, data connections, DLL hell, etc.
It's MUCH faster (performance wise) to use a programming language (Delphi, Kylix, C/C++) and a dbms to achieve your results. The learning curve of programming is a language is a little steeper but the payoffs are well worth the effort.
I've never seen a VBA macro that took enough time to actually consider optimizing it. I suppose that they exist though. So if you've convinced your boss that optimizing spreadsheet macros by pushing them down into a compiled DLL is worth his time and money, then good for you! Yay! I'm assuming you are either an employee or consultant, since I'm confident you would not waste time on such tasks if YOU were paying the bill. Show me a business that is actually constrained from making money by the speed of its spreadsheet macros.
The only thing I use Excel for is Solver. Solver turns Excel into the worlds easiest to use linear/non-linear optimizer for ANY function you can put in a spreadsheet. I use Gnumeric a lot, but I always have to go back to Excel for Solver...
Like Douglas Adams said ... Bistromathics ... the only way to process "awful" numbers :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Then next time you take a class from me at a university, I'll assign grades for you using Excel.
Seriously, though: I used to calculate grades in Excel until one day I discovered it making a mistake in its calculations. People's grades were off by one letter in certain cases, depending on what their grade was.
I never use Excel for important calculations anymore.
It's true that open-source spreadsheets may not provide the same functionality--although I'm not sure of that. However, there's nothing trivial about getting correct results from what you are using. Isn't that why you're using the spreadsheet in the first place? To get correct results?